What Does a Good Disaster Recovery Plan Look Like?

September 15, 2017

Disaster can strike your business at any time.

Disaster can strike your business at any time. Natural disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods can destroy your offices. Terrorist attacks and cyber scams could cause devastating downtime. But if you’ve prepared a disaster recovery plan ahead of time, your company’s information, employees, and livelihood should all come out safely intact. What are some components that make up a good disaster recovery plan?

Analysis of Possible Threats

Being aware of any possible threats to your business is the first step to protecting it against an emergency. Your disaster recovery plan should be as thorough as possible, and include responses to any all and all potential risks. Design a recovery plan for each individual situation. For instance, if your servers in Baltimore go down, how does it affect your business operations in Virginia? However, no matter how comprehensive your plan is, you should also give more weight to technological hazards than ones brought by the weather.

Business Impact Analysis

The second component of a strong disaster recovery plan involves a business impact analysis, or BIA. The BIA looks to determine the consequences of natural and human disasters in regards to a business. The consequences could be financial, regulatory, reputation-based, and so on. How will your business continue in the event of some unforeseen disaster? A BIA can help you plan for just such an event.

Employee Input

Make your employees feel valued when designing a disaster recovery plan. Besides considering the IT element of your business, you have to factor in the human element as well. Ask your employees for ideas in shaping these plans. Most importantly of all, designate someone to be the public face of your company in case disaster strikes – who will speak to clients, employees, and all those affected? Don’t forget to establish a good relationship with law enforcement and other authorities who can help should the occasion arise.

Revisions

Revisit your existing plan constantly. Make the necessary updates based on the results of drills. Incorporate newer technologies and strategies as they come down the pipeline. They may be more useful than you think.

Practice Drills

Once you have a solid plan, test it out. Just as emergency drills are regularly held in schools, you should do the same in your business. If you don’t put it into practice, how will you know if it will work?

IT Solutions and Network Protection from Global Harvest Networks

Global Harvest Networks has been working for the Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia areas since 2000 and we’re ready to lend our expertise to you! We offer a wide range of IT solutions that can tackle any and all of your network’s needs. Please don’t hesitate to contact us so that we can help you! You can also give us a call at 410-691-1130. We’re ready to assess your system, diagnose the problem, and help you find a plan that will strengthen your network all free of charge! For more information on the latest things you should protect your system from, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube.